The one thing that limits our ability to understand our universe, more than anything else, is money. Funding for space exploration limits how many spacecraft we can send to other worlds. Funding for space-related sciences limits how many Ph.D. scientists can do science as a career. Funding, more than anything else, is why there are very basic facts about other worlds in our own solar system that we don’t know.

Venus. It’s the planet closest to the Earth. We sent a spacecraft to it for the first time in 1962. The graduate students who worked on the mission are now all old enough to receive social security benefits. 

The thing is, once we learned that Venus is a ghastly world of soaring temperatures and acidic rains, we kind of turned our back on this planet. Sure, we’ve used its gravity to help missions like Galileo, Cassini, and MESSENGER get to other planets, but the last U.S. mission dedicated to this planet was the 1990 Magellan mission, and globally, the only other probes have been the 2006 Venus Express and the 2015 Akatsuki.  Exploring something covered in clouds that eats missions attempting to make it to the surface is hard and expensive. Going to the more distant Mars is easier, and there will be more missions launched to Mars during the current launch window than there have been missions sent to orbit Venus in the past two generations. This lack of missions means fewer data and also means less funding for jobs as the two are often related.

This lack of missions to Venus is why I say with annoyance that we now know, 58 years after the Mariner 2 Venus fly by, that Venus has active volcanoes. This basic fact, that Venus is still tectonically active, is new and exciting and has been way too long in coming. 

A new paper in Nature Geoscience, with lead author Anna Gulcher, identifies 37 recently active volcanic structures on Venus. This radically changes our understanding of this world from one where we thought some global, cataclysmic event led to a massive resurfacing about 500-700 million years ago, to now thinking this world, much like our own, is undergoing constant resurfacing that prevents the buildup of craters on its surface. 

According to co-author Laurent Montési: This study significantly changes the view of Venus from a mostly inactive planet to one whose interior is still churning and can feed many active volcanoes. 

This work used new, detailed models of Venus to understand how the crown-shaped geology associated with mantle plumes change over time. The 37 still-active plumes they identified are clustered up in a handful of locations that would make ideal targets for future missions, including the 2032 launch of the European Space Agency’s EnVision mission. 

The fact that we have so much left to learn about planets in our own solar system sometimes makes it hard to grasp how much we can know about planets in other solar systems.

More Information

The University of Maryland press release 

“Corona Structures Driven by Plume-Lithosphere Interactions and Evidence for Ongoing Plume Activity on Venus,” Anna J. P. Gülcher, Taras V. Gerya, Laurent G. J. Montési & Jessica Munch, 2020 July 20, Nature Geoscience